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> Strong identity and long lived keys are a requirement. Perfect forward secrecy does not make sense in a world were I want to prove that all things signed by m
by Seirdy 5y ago
> Strong identity and long lived keys are a requirement. Perfect forward secrecy does not make sense in a world were I want to prove that all things signed by me are in fact signed by me. If I generated a new key, how do I distribute that key to someone else in a way they can trust that key? And if you have that secure channel working and trust worthy, why do you even need to sign anything?
A communication platform should handle this for you. Every modern E2EE platform offers out-of-band verification. The problem with PGP is it's used as a "go-to" encryption and verification tool for other situations where PFS is necessary (e.g. communication) due to its network effect ("it's already installed"). Minisign/Signify, in comparison, are used just for verification; they are a better fit for this because they don't try to be anything else.
> but even in the case of encryption (age) you have a similar key distribution problem. If you are constantly making ephemeral keys that's great, but it also means you need the receiver to make a new key on every file the sender wants to send. This means people will still have long lived keys, and perfect forward secrecy does not apply.
Age is for file encryption. An E2EE communication protocol/platform should have provisions to automate this process.
> PGP has been around for a long long time. None of the options were insecure when they were implemented. Minsign and age have decided that their tools will only have 1 algo, the correct and most secure one. However that can change in just a few years. At which point it will either become more like PGP or we will have to migrate everyone to the new best tool. This is madness.
It is better to have new versions of a standard than to extend a standard to include all possibilities. The equivalent would be making all TLS and SSL versions just extensions of the original SSL standard; a client talking to a server would negotiate between a plethora of secure and insecure cipher suites.
Age uses 256-bit AES keys and the HKDF; Signify uses Ed25519 signatures. If these are found to be insecure in the coming decades, the solution would be to release a spec for Age 2 or Signify 2 instead of just adding an option to use a different combination of algos/curves/KDFs.
> As you say this data is untrusted and unsigned. Having it proves nothing about the ownership of the private key.
No, I didn't say that. I said that it supports both trusted and untrusted comments. Trusted comments are signed.
> In the end there is not actual end user impact here, besides making it much more difficult to know if the signature of a package is valid manually.
Given a source, sig, and pubkey, verification can be done with the following command:
minisign -V -m %{SOURCE} -x %{SIG} -P %{public_key}
This isn't any harder than using GPG unless you're using the "it's already installed" argument, which kinda proves my point about the network effects exacerbated by having a "do-it-all" tool instead of a "do-one-thing" tool. Minisign dogfoods this to sign its releases, and you can see Fedora's RPM spec use it quite easily to verify its tarball:
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/minisign/blob/rawhide/f/minisign.spec#_26 https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/minisign/blob/rawhide/f/m...
- georgyo 5y ago> It is better to have new versions of a standard than to extend a standard to include all possibilities. The equivalent would be making all TLS and SSL versions just extensions of the original SSL standard; a client talking to a server would negotiate between a plethora of secure and insecure cipher suites. > Age uses 256-bit AES keys and the HKDF; Signify uses Ed25519 signatures. If these are found to be insecure in the coming decades, the solution would be to release a spec for Age 2 or Signify 2 instead of just adding an option to use a different combination of algos/curves/KDFs. I hope you realize this doesn't make sense. Would minsign2 be able to read minsign1? For an end user, they will need to know even more out of band information about the signature they want to verify. The extremely poor ergonomics of minsign are my problem with it. It doesn't have solutions for many problems, and it's users flat out hand wave future problems.
- Seirdy 5y ago> I hope you realize this doesn't make sense. Would minsign2 be able to read minsign1? For an end user, they will need to know even more out of band information about the signature they want to verify. "Signify 2" would be a specification, not a program. A future Age or Signify implementation would be able to handle multiple versions of their specs without mixing their components together just as easily as: - A TLS/SSL program (OpenSSL, LibreSSL, bssl, etc) can work with TLS 1.2 and 1.3. - libcurl can handle HTTP/1.0, HTTP/1.1, and HTTP/2.0 Say Age 2 uses, I don't know, "AES-512" (I pulled that out of my ass for illustrative purposes, don't tell anyone) and Argon2id instead of AES-256 and the HKDF. Your choices would be Age 1 or Age 2; you wouldn't be able to use both AES-512 and the HKDF, or AES-256 and Argon2id. There would be fewer combinations to keep track of, making it easier for other implementations to support less as insecure standards get phased out (c.f. TLS 1.0, 1.1). Insecure standards will still be around and be relatively simple to implement for anyone interested (especially for Signify, whose spec is so basic). This is how versioned specs are supposed to work, with iteration rather than extension. The command I demonstrated wouldn't have to change. If Age followed the PGP approach, a future version would support choosing either AES-256 or AES-512, and either the HKDF or Argon2id. You'd mix-and-match, and write all the metadata into the file. It'd be much harder to move away from bad standards. Instead, right now, Age just writes the version of the Age spec being used; that implies the rest.